Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America by Jeremy Jennings

Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America
By Jeremy Jennings
Harvard University Press 2023

For nearly 200 years, Alexis de Tocqueville has been one of those authors who’s more entertaining to read than to read about. In addition to being seminal, his 1835 book De la démocratie en Amérique is also endlessly entertaining and has been since the moment it rolled off the presses – if you were faced with the choice between, say, reading Democracy in America in the nice plump Penguin Classics paperback or reading some new treatment or study of the author or his work, even the most dedicated Tocqueville scholar would probably tell you to read the book itself, the searching and often quite deadpan 20-something aristocrat’s account of his 1831 tour through the very young United States. 

And yet, despite that evergreen approachability, Tocqueville books continue to appear, and the most recent is one of the most enjoyable in decades: Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America by Jeremy Jennings, a 500-page work focusing on all the other places Tocqueville visited and what he thought about them. 

Jennings is aware of the problems that arise in connection with such a project. “Critics have argued that Tocqueville frequently did not see beyond what his first impressions were and that these were often based on scant empirical evidence,” he writes at the outset of his book. “All too often, it has been argued, Tocqueville learned nothing from his travels and was more interested in mixing with the social elites of the country he was visiting than in learning about it to any significant degree.” Since such critics have always been rather self-evidently full of sheep-dip, even such a mild concession is generous – but even so, there’s no denying that Tocqueville could be both obliviously snobbish and also intractable. Although he himself warned people about considering Democracy in America to be a mere travelogue, he sometimes mimics the way an entire generation of later travel-writers often seemed to carry the narrow prejudices of their writing-cubbies with them wherever they went. A series of reactions to Italy stands in well for the rest:

If Tocqueville’s stay in Italy subsequently improved, his grim view of Italian political and social realities did not. To Beaumont in early January 1851 he confided that the worst side of his stay was that he could study all kinds of things, except Italy. “Fear, ignorance, and a deep indifference towards everything amongst which people live here,” he continued, “closes all mouths.” Nor was it easy to meet people. “Middle-class Italians,” Tocqueville wrote, are not bothered about visiting you because they do not want you to visit them and they do not want you to visit them because they live in hovels of which they are ashamed and which nevertheless they have no wish to transform into clean and comfortable apartments.” How could one learn from people, he asked, who themselves had no desire to learn anything?

Classic Tocqueville, equally sharp and vivid. Travels with Tocqueville is full of such passages, the great majority of which are drawn by Jennings from Tocqueville’s correspondence and therefore will be new even to many English-language devotees of this author. This alone would hugely recommend the book, and the spirit and insight Jennings brings to his narration only adds to the fun. 

No amount of such fun can change the arc of such adventures. As no less an authority than James T. Kirk attests, “Galloping around the cosmos is a game for the young.” As this book’s narrative inevitably shows, the drift of years gradually weighed on Tocqueville. Doctors and the ghastly quackery of the age have more and more mentions as the pages turn. By 1858 Tocqueville is in Paris being tormented by not one but two doctors, both of whom seem to be inventing outlandish treatments out of thin air. “One can perhaps understand Tocqueville’s irritation when his wife appeared to suggest he was exaggerating his fears about his health,” Jennings writes. “If he was melancholic, he replied, it was because he saw that in future his life might well be dogged by illness and medical treatments.” 

As many a wide traveler can attest, it isn’t only weariness that increases with time: fondness for hearth and comfort grows too. It’s touching to watch this happen in even so adventurous a spirit as Tocqueville’s. “Who would have imagined,” he wrote to his wife in these later years, longing for the Tocqueville lands, “that a man who had such a passionate desire to spread out into the world would have come to attach his being so strongly to a small corner of the earth and to his inner life.”

But the main impression of Travels with Tocqueville Beyond America belongs to that passionate desire to spread out into the world. This is an Alexis de Tocqueville not quite like any readers have previously met, a man no longer defined either by his native France or by the fledgling United States with which he’s oddly synonymous. If this is travel-writing, it’s done in a mighty key.

Steve Donoghue is a founding editor of Open Letters Monthly. His book criticism has appeared in The Washington Post, The American Conservative, The Spectator, The Wall Street Journal, The National, and the Daily Star. He writes regularly for The Boston Globe, the Vineyard Gazette, and the Christian Science Monitor and is the Books editor of Georgia’s Big Canoe News.